Younger manufacturing workers share ideas freely but lack the deep listening and decades of hands-on knowledge that veterans possess. The industry needs systematic ways to capture shop-floor expertise before it's lost, using knowledge-graph technology to make tacit skills accessible and valuable.
So I do think that you're going to see a lot more openness just by virtue of the culture of the younger generation. But the warning here is that the younger generation, although they are better at sharing, I've noticed— and this is, you know, I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, and that's okay. But I've also noticed that they don't necessarily listen well, right? And they don't necessarily know, they certainly don't know all of the things that we do About how to do things, knowledge that has been gained over decades, as you're aware, 35 years in manufacturing, you probably know some things. So what needs to happen is not that we have to be careful that we don't go too far in this other direction where we're just making things up and we're all chatting, but is it really good? And so I think that the real challenge for us is to blend that new mentality of openness and community with the hard knowledge base that we really are strong in in this country.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, it draws to my thinking even challenging the notion of what a knowledge worker is, right? So a knowledge worker traditionally would be defined as somebody who works one of these things all the time, right? I would argue that you look into the manufacturing domain right now and some of the best knowledge that's out there that is really undergirding a big chunk— I couldn't quantify it, but a big chunk of the operations in a manufacturing environment happen based on the knowledge of the workers. And that's in their hands and that's in their experiences and things like that. So the ability to draw out of them and learn from them, there really isn't a system today to do that, I get excited about the concepts that you talk about from the knowledge graphs and the data and the data capture and sharing stuff and say, well, why can't that person as a domain expert participate in the gig economy, right? Get value for the knowledge that they have.
